The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), which undertakes activities for standardizing recent mobile communication systems, discusses System Architecture Enhancement (SAE), which is a system architecture of Long Term Evolution (LTE). 3GPP is in the process of creating specifications for the Evolved Packet System (EPS), as a communication system which realizes an all-IP architecture. Note that a core network constituting the EPS is called the Evolved Packet Core (EPC).
Furthermore, 3GPP recently discusses a Machine to Machine (M2M) communication technology. Note that the M2M communication may be machine-machine type communication. 3GPP discusses Cellular Internet of Things (CIoT), in particular, as a technology for supporting Internet of Things (IoT) in a cellular network of 3GPP.
IoT includes a mobile phone terminal such as a smartphone and refers to various IT equipment such as a personal computer and a sensor device, and CIoT extracts technical problems in connecting various terminal apparatuses like these to a cellular network to create specifications for solutions to the problems.
For example, it is demanded, in CIoT, to optimize a communication procedure for a terminal which needs to increase an efficiency of power consumption such that a battery can be maintained for several years, to cope with communication in an indoor or underground state, and to provide connectivities to a large amount of inexpensively mass-produced terminals. Furthermore, in CIoT, it is demanded to support low data rate communication of a simple end node as a requirement.
In this description, a terminal permitted to connect to these 3GPP core networks is called a CIoT terminal.